Not all German entrepreneurs were Oskar Schindler. "Rather to the contrary," smiles with slight irony the Dutch journalist David de Jong, author of the book Money and Power in the Third Reich (Principal of the Books), an investigation into some of the most powerful business dynasties in Germany who did not hesitate in supporting Hitler and doing business with the Third Reich. Staying large Jewish businesses and companies from the invaded countries at bargain prices – for which they fought without embarrassment moving all the springs within their reach – or even secretly producing weapons when Germany was not authorized.
Or, of course, using slave labor from the concentration camps, for which they built subcamps around their businesses: in the Pertrix battery factory of the almighty Quandt family, the chief of staff was Herbert Quandt – who after the war would rescue to BMW, in which her father owned 30% and was in free fall – half a thousand women from Ravensbrück and Auschwitz were forced to handle unprotected burning battery acids that pierced their skin. And of Anton Piëch, son-in-law of Ferdinand Porsche, De Jong says that with him "a regime of terror governed in the Volkswagen factory in Fallersleben", a population today part of Wolfsburg, headquarters of the automobile giant. Piëch, a believing Nazi, declared in fact that he needed more cheap workers to fulfill Hitler's wish that the Volkswagen, the "people's car" devised for the Führer by his father-in-law – who also designed tanks – be manufactured at 990 marks , mimicking the affordability of the Ford T. In that factory, in which forced adolescents also worked, women were forced to give newborn babies to a "Children's Center for Foreign Children" in a neighboring town, Rühen, in in which 365 Russian and Polish babies died due to lack of care.
“I was in Wolfsburg two weeks ago. The train station is next to the factory. It is the same building built from 1938 to 1940, a huge complex. It was strange to think that there were sub-concentration camps where he looked, maybe where he was, and that thousands of people were exploited and hundreds of babies died. The British took over the factory after the war and began to mass-produce the Beetles,” recalls De Jong.
His book traces the trajectories of families such as the Porsche-Piëch, the Quandt (Varta, BMW), the Oetker (Dr. Oetker), the Flick (who became owners of Daimler-Benz after the war) or the Von Finck (investors who co-founded Allianz and Munich Re), steelmakers, chemicals, bankers, food and weapons manufacturers who, in addition, are in some cases crossed by the most shocking stories of Nazism. Like Günther Quandt, whose second wife and mother of his son Harald, Magda, would become Goebbels's wife, with whom he would commit suicide along with his six children in Hitler's bunker.
Businessmen who, he portrays, mostly at the beginning think that Hitler is "rather mediocre" -Quandt's first impression-, but that in the midst of the crisis of 1929 they are no longer disgusted by anything and once he takes power and they begin the processes of "Aryanization" of the companies, the Nuremberg racial laws are proclaimed and the massive rearmament begins, they enlist to take advantage of the opportunities. Very soon: "While people thought we were making cooking pots, in 1934 we were already preparing the Führer's war," Patriarch Quandt would admit. And they seamlessly used concentration camp workers, be they Siemens, IG Farben, Volkswagen, Krupp, Daimler or BMW in a system that approached, he says, "extermination through labor."
It was also used by the companies of Friedrich Flick, for the author the most infamous industrial businessman of Nazi Germany and "the most defining of the German industry of the 20th century, more than Fritz Thyssen, Krupp or Quandt, because he managed to be the richest man of Germany in the 1930s, 1940s and 1960s. When he died in 1972 he was one of the five richest men in the world”. Under Nazism he controlled a steel, coal and weapons conglomerate and after being tried in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity he was released in 1950 and “in 1960 he is again the richest in the country as the main shareholder of Daimler-Benz. For seventy years he defined the business of the country and had immense power, also political”, says De Jong.
Which explains that despite their involvement with the regime, not many more businessmen would be punished. "When the Cold War began in 1947, Nazi Germany was ancient history for Americans," he says, noting that Americans did not want to put capitalists on trial and their denazification processes against big business were more relaxed than in the British or French. "Families like the Quandts went to Bavaria to their zone of occupation and did very well," she observes.
But could these businessmen have acted differently before Hitler? "Yes," the author concludes, "Fritz Thyssen, Hitler's first industrial supporter in 1925, opposes the 1939 invasion of Poland as a member of Parliament, marches to Paris, is arrested and taken to a concentration camp, and the empire Thyssen puts himself under the command of Otto Steinbrinck, Flick's right-hand man. And he knew what would happen to him. The others could have just left and not participated.”
